How are the small, remote settlements of the world (i.e. upper Greenland, Nunavut, Pitcairn Island, Tristan de Cunha) able to avoid a completely incestuous population?
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Isolated communities normally had some level of inbreeding. There are plently of communities connected by easy transport links to nearby populations that are quite inbred. However there are a few things that can counteract it: exogamy; meaning that marriages within the island, community or tribe are taboo and people have to go outside to find an acceptable partner; this could necessitate quite long, risky journeys and there was often a semi-reciprocal relationship, i.e our men traditionally find wives in the island 130 miles to the West and their men come here to marry our daughters, which in general gave some companionship and protection to whichever partner got transplanted but did also decrease the effectiveness against inbreeding.
Another factor was trade, when explorers or anthropologists started studying Pacific islanders, for example, they found that an awful lot of effort and risk went into trading goods between islands, far more than the actual value and utility of the goods could justify, the explanation is that the cultural exchanges of stories, ideas, people and genetic material fostered by the trade were much more important than the trade itself.
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